Leeds United 0-2 Birmingham City: Heat Map
There was one potent gleam hotting up the map in the second half, and that was the wing play of Jordan Botaka, who for fifteen minutes after he came on a substitute showed himself to be everything I didn’t dare believe he would be, but nothing I had hoped for.
This doesn’t often happen to me. But about fifteen minutes into the second half, I saw Mowatt gain and then lose possession in the centre circle. And I turned to the bloke next to me and asked, “Did Mowatt come on as a sub?”
“No,” he said, rightly. “He’s been playing from the start.”
As I said, this doesn’t often happen to me, but as part of a concerted effort to relax and enjoy something of life, I’d had a couple of drinks. Unfortunately I’d also made watching Leeds United part of this effort, which is how me and Alex Mowatt came to crossed purposes with nearly an hour gone.
I don’t really blame Mowatt for my oversight. There are audible murmurs of complaint about the performances we’re getting lately from the player who, last season, took personal responsibility for saving the team almost single handed on several occasions, and the fact I didn’t notice him at all for the first hour suggests this wasn’t vintage from The Artist Formerly Known as MC Freestyle. But his lack of impact against Birmingham wasn’t entirely his fault.
Heat maps have been an interesting innovation, providing an easy-to-understand visualisation of where most of the action was in a game, where players spent most of their time, where the ball was most often to found. As as Bamba passed to Cooper who passed to Bamba who passed to Cooper who booted it over Buckley’s head, again, I looked at the grass between our two centre backs, and imagined I could see scorchmarks on the seared turf, to add to the damage the rugby lot did last weekend.
There’s not much point addressing the performance of Mowatt, or of Lewis Cook or Luke Murphy, until we’ve dealt with the fact that on Saturday Leeds relied far too much on the centre halves to make the play. Birmingham came to Elland Road to sit back, soak up pressure, and counter attack, and we knew that in advance. Our response to let Bamba and Cooper play keep-ball and then for one or the other to attempt a Baresi-esque pass from their own penalty area on to a sixpence in the other; or for them to stumble upfield into Mowatt, Cook and Murphy’s territory and malfunction like a cat-bearing Roomba running low on batteries.